As Boxerbaum and Kleberg examined the photographic composites and the data provided by the two victims, everything seemed to point to a single assailant: a white American male, between twenty-three and twenty-seven, weighing between 175 and 185 pounds, with brown or reddish-brown hair. Both times the man had worn a brown jogging top, jeans and white sneakers.

Carrie Dryer, the first victim, remembered that the rapist wore gloves and carried a small revolver. Occasionally his eyes drifted from side to side—the symptom of an eye condition she recognized as nystagmus. He had handcuffed her to the inside door of her car and drove her to a desolate country area, where he raped her. After the rape he told her, “If you go to the police, don’t give them my description. If I see anything in the newspaper, I’ll send someone after you.” As if to prove he meant business, he took names from her address book.

Donna West, a short, plump nurse, said her assailant carried an automatic pistol. There was something on his hands—not dirt or grease, but an oily stain of some kind. At one point he had said his name was Phil. He cursed a lot. He wore brown-tinted sunglasses, and she never saw his eyes. He took the names of relatives and warned her that if she identified him, she or someone in her family would be harmed by a “brotherhood” that would carry out his threats. She, and the police, assumed he was boasting about being part of a terrorist organization or the Mafia.

Kleberg and Boxerbaum were confused by only one significant difference in the two descriptions. The first man was described as having a full, neatly trimmed mustache. The second was described as having a three-day growth of beard but no mustache.

Boxerbaum smiled. “I guess between the first time and the second he shaved it off.”

At the Central Police Station in downtown Columbus, Detective Nikki Miller, assigned to the Sexual Assault Squad, checked in for the second shift at three o’clock. Wednesday, October 26. She had just returned from a two-week vacation in Las Vegas, feeling and looking refreshed, her tan complementing her brown eyes and feathercut sandy hair. Detective Gram-lich of the first shift told her he was transporting a young rape victim to University Hospital. Since it would be Millers case, Gramlich gave her the few details he had.

Polly Newton, a twenty-one-year-old student at Ohio State, had been abducted behind her apartment near the university campus at about eight o’clock that morning. After she parked her boyfriend’s blue Corvette, she was forced back inside and told to drive out to an isolated area in the countryside, where she was raped. Her assailant then made her drive back to Columbus to cash two checks, before having her drive him back to the campus area. Then he suggested that she cash another check, stop payment, and keep the money herself.

Because Nikki Miller had been on vacation, she hadn’t read of the university Campus Rapist or seen the composites. Detectives on the first shift filled her in on the details.